The impact of peers on student outcomes has important policy implications for how students are organized into classes and the overall impact of education interventions. But it is difficult to accurately measure peer effects because of the nonrandom sorting of students and teachers into...

State policies affect the qualifications of beginning teachers in numerous ways, including regulating entry requirements, providing incentives for graduate degrees, and subsidizing preparation programs at public universities. In this paper we assess how these policy choices affect student...

Using data on a large sample of recent Italian graduates, this paper investigates the extent to which participation in study abroad programs during university studies impacts subsequent employment likelihood. To address the problem of endogeneity related to participation in study abroad...

We investigate whether commonly used value-added estimation strategies produce accurate estimates of teacher effects under a variety of scenarios. We estimate teacher effects in simulated student achievement data sets that mimic plausible types of student grouping and teacher assignment...

This paper examines voluntary contributions to public education via charitable school foundations, booster clubs, parent teacher associations, and parent teacher organizations. We use panel data on school-supporting charities with national coverage from 1995 to 2010, which we geocode and match...

This is the first study to directly examine the relationship between tax increment financing (TIF) and education expenditures, using the state of Iowa as a case study. I find that greater use of TIF is associated with reduced education expenditures. I also find little evidence to support the...

I investigate a possible unintended consequence of Proposition 2½ override behavior -- that it led to increased segregation in school districts in Massachusetts. This can occur because richer, low-minority towns tend to have more successful override votes that attract similar households with...

Strong literacy skills are crucial to ensuring an individual's future educational and economic success. Existing evidence suggests the transition from elementary to middle school is a decisive period for literacy development. In this paper I investigate the impact of extended learning time in...

Do teachers assess same-race students more favorably? This paper uses nationally representative data on teacher assessments of student ability that can be compared with test scores to determine whether teachers give better assessments to same-race students. The data set follows students from...